MLB attendance is defined as tickets sold.
If you buy a ticket for a Major League Baseball game, and then you don’t attend that game, your ticket that MLB sold you still counts in the officially announced attendance figure for that game. To put it another way, MLB attendance figures do not represent actual attendance, but rather, the total tickets sold for that game. The National League used to count turnstile clicks (aka ‘people in seats’), while the American League has always counted tickets sold. In 1992, the National League also began counting tickets sold instead of how many ticket-holders actually attended. Some sources say this was mainly because of revenue sharing (and the need to standardize the bookkeeping for all the MLB franchises), but revenue sharing only began ten years later, in 2002, which was a decade after the NL had started measuring attendance by tickets sold {see this, Attendance figures that count tickets sold, not turnstile clicks, make it hard for fans to reconcile what they hear with the empty seats they see (by Bill Shaikin at the Los Angeles Times)}.

In any case, counting tickets sold rather than turnstile clicks conveniently allows all 30 Major League ball clubs to get away with consistently painting a rosier picture of their attendance than what the reality is. The sad truth of the matter is, late in the season, with respect to games where the home team is out of the Pennant race, many MLB games have actual crowds that are up to around 40% less than the announced crowd size. That is because many fans who had bought tickets for that game earlier in the year then decided that it wasn’t worth attending a meaningless game late in the season, because their basement-dwelling ball club had nothing to play for.

If you think that this is all pretty disingenuous, I won’t argue with that. I will simply point out this…the way that they tabulate official attendance figures in two of the three other major leagues – the NBA and the NHL – is far more dishonest. That is because the NBA and the NHL count tickets distributed toward what their official attendance figures are announced as. [Meanwhile, the NFL leaves it up to the teams, and 30 NFL teams count tickets sold, while the New York Giants and the Pittsburgh Steelers count turnstile clicks/ {see this, specifically paragraph 6 (cbssports.com by John Breech)}; {also see this, which lists the 4 major leagues' attendance-count policies, The book on attendance (utsandiego.com by Mark Zeigler)}].

And when the NBA and the NHL are measuring attendance by tickets distributed, that includes the often sizable number of tickets given away for free {see this article, How Sports Attendance Figures Speak Lies (by Maury Brown of the Biz of Baseball site, at forbes.com)}. And it is even more dishonest, because as they inflate the attendance by measuring it this way, they are inflating the “attendance” figure even more, because that tickets-distributed-attendance-figure includes all tickets distributed…even in those cases when the recipient of the free ticket didn’t even attend the game (seriously). Some NHL teams, particularly those outside of Western Canada and Toronto and Montreal, as well as those outside of the US Northeast and the US Upper Midwest, give away up to 3,000 free tickets a game! Which is how poor-drawing major-league hockey clubs in the Sunbelt, for example, can pretend they have far more ticket-buying fans than they really do. Thankfully, some franchises are seeing the corrosive effects of this (how would you feel if you shelled out big bucks for season tickets for a major-league hockey team, when sitting all around you are people seeing the game for free?)…{see this article from Oct.2014, where one of those under-supported-NHL-Sunbelt teams (the Florida Panthers) now has new ownership that is trying to stop the attendance-figure-dishonesty, by announcing actual turnstile clicks as the announced attendance, The Florida Panthers’ Empty Den (onlyagame.wbur.org)}.

So, at least, when you are given figures that measure not the actual attendance, but instead measure total tickets purchased (as in MLB)…well, you know one thing for sure, and that is that they (the MLB teams) are not lying about how many ticket they sold. They are only lying about the number of actual spectators at (some of) their games.

On the map page…
At the far right of the map page is 2014 paid-attendance for all 30 MLB teams, along with 3 other statistics: percent-change from 2013, 2014 ballpark seating capacity, 2014 percent-capacity (which is paid-attendance divided by stadium seating capacity). At the lower right-hand corner of the map page, there are asterisk-type notes on 3 things: Boston’s different home capacities for day games and night games at Fenway Park in Boston, MA; notes on the Oakland A’s pretend-capacity (via huge tarps covering the upper decks at O.co Coliseum in Oakland, CA); and also notes on the Tampa Bay Rays’ pretend-capacity (also thanks to the egregious deployment of tarps, at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, FL).

The circular-cap-logos on the map page are all each MLB teams’ 2014 home cap logo, except with respect to Baltimore’s circular-cap-logo, which is of their all-black road cap, because the Orioles wear their white-paneled cap at home, and I wanted to maintain a uniformity to all 30 of the circular-cap-logos on the map. The circular-cap-logos were then sized to reflect crowd size, utilizing a constant gradient (the larger the ball club’s 2014 home regular season average paid-attendance, the larger their circular-cap-logo is on the map). I used cap logos from either the ball clubs’ pages at Wikipedia or at the excellent Chris Creamer’s Sports Logos.net, depending on which was more accurate in terms of actual cap-color as well as in terms of the logo itself (Yankees and Cubs cap logos are wrong at Wikipedia, and it looks like about 17 cap-logo background colors are wrong there as well).
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Thanks to NuclearVacuum for the blank map, File:BlankMap-North America-Subdivisions.svg (commons.wikimedia.org).
Thanks to ESPN for attendances & percent capacities, espn.go.com/mlb/attendance.
Thanks to Chris Creamer’s Sports Logos.net, for several (~17) of the cap logos, sportslogos.net.
Thanks to the contributors at en.wikipedia.org, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_League_Baseball#Current_teams.

Update: biggest upsets in the 2014-15 FA Cup 5th Round…
The chart below shows the 3 biggest upsets in the 2014-15 FA Cup 5th Round (from Saturday 14th and Sunday 15th of February 2015/if there is an upset Monday [Preston v Man Utd], the chart will be updated). Note: league placements were from the start of the weekend (that is, Friday morning the 13th of Feb. 2015)…

By James Nalton
Defending champions St Helens head into Super League XX under a new head coach – club legend Keiron Cunningham – and retain their status as the good outside bet they were in last season’s Grand Final. Their opponents that day, Wigan Warriors, are favourites to take the crown this time around, in a year which is being dubbed a new era for the sport of rugby league.

With the new era comes a new format, which looks confusing on first glance, but aims to provide a sustainable system of promotion and relegation in which a team dropping to a lower division won’t be crippled either on the pitch, or on the balance sheet. It also means that most teams will have something to play for from the first game till the last.

It’s the first time since the end of 2007 that promotion and relegation has been used, although Bradford Bulls and London Broncos were relegated at the end of 2014 to facilitate the move to a 12 team Super League.

The clubs discussed the idea at length before implementing the changes, with the Chairman of Super League Europe, Brian Barwick, commenting that:

“The clubs were unanimous in their view that Super League should become a 12-team competition from 2015 and that there should be meaningful movement between Super League and the Championships.”

The season culminates in the end of season play-offs, and the “Super 8s”, in which the 24 teams from the Super League and Championship are split into three groups of 8, based on their league position, to decide who wins what and who stays in which division.

The first eight will play for the Super League crown, with the top four after seven games going on to the Super League play-offs to decide the winner.

The second eight will fight for a Super League place next season, with the top three from this group claiming a spot in 2016, and the teams finishing 4th and 5th playing off in “The Million Pound Game” to decide the fourth team who’ll make the top league.

The favourites Wigan boast a squad of impressive local players, with many coming through the club’s own academy production line. Their faith in this system has seen them assign the number six jersey to 20-year-old George Williams, rather than look to replace departing Australian stand-off, Blake Green, with another overseas player.

Local academy players Joe Burgess and Dom Crosby were also rewarded with numbers in the first XIII, taking the number 5 and 8 shirts respectively. They join a whole host of players in the Wigan squad who originate from Lancashire’s rugby heartlands, with many joining the club from local amateur side Wigan St Patricks.

Indeed, the entire top division has gone back to its roots in the working class towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire, with the only exception being Catalans Dragons, who are based in the south of France – another traditional league stronghold.

James Nalton is a writer based in Liverpool, England, whose sportswriting focuses on football tactics, emerging talents in world football, and rugby league. He owns several websites covering football around the globe, and has also written for the likes of Squawka, Sambafoot, and EPL Index. James also writes music reviews for local publications, and has a degree in Music Production from The University of Huddersfield. You can follow him on Twitter @JDNalton.

…

Below are club-profile illustrations for each of the 4 semifinalists in 2014 Super League XIX (champions St Helens, runner-up Wigan Warriors, and quarterfinals winners Catalans Dragons and Warrington Wolves). Included in each illustration is: club info, stadium photos and info, major titles listed, average attendance from the last 4 seasons (2011-14), club history with stadiums and derbies noted, recent home jerseys shown, and photos & stats of top players in 2014…

…Notes on the map page…
The map page features, on the far left, a map of England and a map of France (which shows the location and crest of Super League club Catalans Dragons). At the top centre is an enlarged inset map of Northern England (which shows the locations and crests of 11 of the 12 Super League clubs). At the top right is the all-time English rugby league national titles list (1895-96; 1902-03 to 1914-15; 1919-20 to 1938-39; 1941-42 to 2014/[Super League established in 1996/SL playoffs began in 1998]). At the lower centre is 2014 attendance data for Super League XX clubs. Included in the attendance data are league averages for crowd size in the last 3 seasons (in SL XVII, XVIII, XIX/2012, 2013, 2014).
Here are the Super League league average attendance numbers for the last 3 seasons…
2012: 9,048.
2013: 8,570.
2014: 8,153.
The re-introduction of promotion/relegation in Super League was probably needed, because, while Super League attendances overall have not plummeted, they certainly are on a downward trend. In 2014, average crowds in Super League were down 4.1% (from 2013), and were down 9.9% from two seasons ago. That has been a drop-off of 895 per game. With the relegation of abysmally-drawing London Broncos, plus some hopefully tight relegation dogfights this season, Super League XX will most likely see an uptick in the league average crowd size.